simplicity in preaching, you must use plenty of anecdotes and
man, to speak for anyone but himself? Why not stand up on Sunday and say, "Reading in the Word of God, I have found a text containing such things as these, and I come to set them before you"?
Many people, I am sure, do not understand what the preacher's "we" means. The expression leaves them in a kind of fog. If you say, "I, the pastor of the parish, come here to talk of something that concerns your soul, something you should believe, something you should do"— you are at any rate understood. But if you begin to talk in the vague plural number of what" we" ought to do, many of your hearers do not know what you are driving at, and whether you are speaking to yourself or them. I charge and entreat my younger brethren in the ministry not to forget this point. Do try to be as direct as possible. Never mind what people say of you. In this particular do not imitate Chalmers, or Melville, or certain other living pulpit celebrities. Never say "we" when you mean "I." The more you get into the habit of talking plainly to the people, in the first person singular, as old Bishop Latimer did—the simpler will your sermon be, and the more easily understood. The glory of Whitefield's sermons is their directness. But unhappily they were so badly reported, that we cannot now appreciate them.
5. Use Anecdotes and Illustrations
5. The fifth and last hint I wish to give you is this: If you would attain simplicity in preaching, you must use plenty of anecdotes and illustrations. You must regard illustrations as windows through which light is let in upon your subject. Upon this point a great deal might be said, but the limits of a small treatise oblige me to touch it very briefly. I need hardly remind you of the example of Him who